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The Blasted Nostril-Clearing Dance

You know what I’m talking about…where you have to shift your body from side to side, thus shifting your snot-equilibrium and clearing the previously-clogged nostril, but unfortunately also simultaneously clogging the previously-clear one? But you feel like you have to do it, if nothing else than for those three seconds where the transition is taking place and both nostrils are clear…yeah, well I’ve been doing that since Thursday. And it SUCKS and I’m SICK OF IT. My nose is raw, and my sinuses still hurt, so I’m guessing there’s a lot more to come. I can hardly stand the anticipation.

So, I took a day off work to convalesce and hope that maybe, by tomorrow, my teeth will no longer be hurting from sinus pressure, my left ear will pop so I won’t be trapped in a prison of the bell-ringing of my own mind, and I’ll no longer have to carefully blow copious amounts of yellow snot and then cough up more yellow snot. Yep, I just talked about my snot on the blog.

I don’t get sick very often, people. I have this go on maybe once a year…if I’m really unlucky, I’ll get it twice in a year. And I no longer just man up and handle it…somehow, in my mind, I’ve decided that since I sucked it up and handled my kidney stone like man, I don’t have to do it anymore for any other illness….which I’m sure was a thrilling revelation for Joey, who has become my nursemaid for the past five days.

I also have no sense of taste or smell…which was unfortunate considering that Shelli peed on my blue blanket I was using on Saturday. And I totally put it right up to my nose to see if it was cat pee…which it was…which was stupid because I could already see that it was because yellow and blue makes green and because I couldn’t smell anyway. At least she didn’t pee on the new couch. Because I would have laid on that and not smelled it. Blah.

I called in sick this morning. I never do that. But this one has kicked my butt so bad that I felt like I needed another day. Another day to mouth-breathe and to watch Maury Povich. And Steve Wilkos. And then Maury again. And there’s this dude on there in a Cliff Huxtable-type-sweater with a box. A box? I thought that boxes were kind of like mullets…like, you may be willing to admit that you had one twenty years ago, mostly because you know that there’s photographic evidence somewhere so there’s no point denying it, but you’d never be caught dead with one ever again. Who knows? Maybe boxes will come back? This guy obviously has one. Maybe he’s a trend-setter.

Losing your sense of smell totally sucks. I’m sure that my breakfast the past three days has been freaking awesome…pumpkin spice cake (1 can pumpkin + 1 box spice cake mix) with peanut butter, microwaved and then topped with low-fat vanilla ice cream. But I have no idea because I can’t taste anything because I can’t smell anything. I even ate a Warhead to see what its effect would be. Nothing.

I’ve also been hacking so hard that urinary incontinence has become a real concern. I’m going to end up in one of those Poise pad commercials…Thanks to Poise Pads, I can hark up lung oysters to my heart’s content without worrying about people noticing that I’m actually pissing myself!!

Why am I not going to the doctor, you ask? Well, I’m not going to make an appointment to see my PCP over this. Because he’ll take my blood pressure. And tell me I’m fat. And, thanks to changes in my health insurance (thank you, Obama!!), my copay for a Minute Clinic/Urgent Care is more than double that for my regular doctor (why make it easier for people to get seen TODAY when you can make them wait another day for their PCP and get that much sicker!!). And, they’re just going to give me an antibiotic, which is stupid and is why kids are so freaking sick all of the time. I wouldn’t mind some of those industrial-strength cough pills, though. Or the albuterol inhaler.

Ok…..the snot must be pressing on my frontal lobe because I’m really lacking the filter-thingy that tells you when to stop talking. Enjoy your evening. I’ll be shifting from side to side, unable to enjoy my food because I can’t smell/taste it, and coughing until I pee all over myself. I’m going to be fun at work tomorrow!

Oh, P.S. We don’t buy kleenex anymore because we always forget and we just use TP instead. I’ve been through two roles. And it’s not the soft kind. It’s the generic Costco kind.